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I am becoming more and more convinced that the real thread to free software (and I am talking here about software released under a free license, not software that you can download and use for free) is contempt. Proprietary software is a competitor, but not a real threat. Proprietary software cannot really kill free software: no matter how many law suits you start, how many patents you file, how many pre-installed versions of Windows you have, common sense will always win. Contempt, however, the the real danger.

Well, it's not exactly brand new, but I am taking my first real look at Ubuntu Studio 11.04 (based on Ubuntu "Natty Narwhal"). This is what we decided to put on our "guest" computer when Debian "Wheezy" proved not to be so easy, and it gives us an opportunity to step out of our rut and look at a new GNU/Linux distribution.

There are times when I think that there is a special, darkened room at Microsoft peopled by a bunch of guys who seem to have nothing better to do than sit and think up some new wheeze to nobble the opposition. The rap sheet is an inditment in itself: trusted computing, internet driving licenses, DRM, bullying hardware vendors and attempting to strong arm sovereign nation states. You wouldn’t think the list could get any bigger. It just has; but then, recidivism in incurable. It may not, as has often proved in the past, come to anything but if it does it would be problematical for GNU/Linux.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

We all know about the overwhelming supremacy of proprietary software in the desktop market. But not everybody knows that some steps have been taken to try to limit it, in favour of a more fair competition among vendors, and between the proprietary and free software worlds. A key player in assuring that the markets are not artificially biased is the European Commission for Competition. In this article, I review the cases it brought against Microsoft Corporation, with particular attention to the one concerning the bundling of the Internet Explorer web browser to the Windows operating system.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

Sakai: Free as in Freedom, written by Charles Severance (the first Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation) is a personal view of the history of Sakai. The book is a thorough description of how the project and its software evolved. This is not a book about software configuration; it is a book that describes how a community emerged from the actions of individuals. Sakai CLE is a popular Learning Management System composed of more than a million lines of Java code.

Read the review at Free Software Magazine.

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few years, you probably know about the free multimedia codecs with the fishy-sounding names from Xiph.org: Ogg Vorbis (for sound) and Ogg Theora (for video). You might be less familiar with other family and friends, including FLAC (lossless audio), Skeleton (metadata stream), and Kate (subtitles). However, together this collection of codecs can be used with the Ogg container format to provide all of the functionality of a DVD video file — multiple soundtracks, full surround sound, high definition, and selectable subtitles. Having created the various streams for a prototype release of “Sintel” in my last few columns, I’m now going to integrate them into a single video file and test it with some players.

One of the most exciting technological trends in recent years has been the rise of “3D printing” technologies for rapid prototyping of arbitrary shapes. I’ve written about this before for Free Software Magazine, but this month I finally got to try the technology out for myself — in order to create “study models” (a fancy name for “toys”) for my video project, Lunatics. In this column, I’m going to walk through the complete process, from creating 3D models to receiving the final product in the mail.

Read the howto at Free Software Magazine.

One of the more interesting aspects of Ogg Video is that it allows an essentially unlimited number of subtitle tracks to be included. This is especially useful for free-culture videos, since they are generally released globally, and there are often contributed subtitles. In fact, for “Sintel”, I was able to find 44 subtitle files. I will be including them all as Ogg Kate streams in my prototype “Lib-Ray” version of “Sintel”, and in this column I will demonstrate the use of several command line utilities useful for this, especially the kateenc tool for creating the streams.

Ogg Vorbis and Ogg FLAC (the Ogg stream version of the Free Lossless Audio Codec) are popular free-licensed and patent-free codecs for handling sound. These are the formats I’ll be using in a complex Ogg Theora video file that I am creating as part of my “Lib-Ray” experiment in creating an alternative format for distributing high definition video. In order to do this, I’ll need to solve several technical challenges using the FLAC command line tools, Audacity, and VLC, which I’ll demonstrate here.

Latest from the Bizarre Cathedral. Because, sometimes, it's Ok when to tell a little white lie.

This magazine has voiced several concerns over the almost de-facto state of vendor lock-in in the mobile market and with good reason. What is the point of free software if the hardware locks your access to it? This premise was one of the driving forces behind v3 of the GPL and as far as I can tell the OpenPC project and other open hardware projects. But most of these hardware projects relate to the desktop PC model. Where is the equivalent commodity hardware for the mobile market, the tablet “market” or even the laptop one?

This year seems to been continuing where last year left off: Oracle/Sun, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, Ubuntu and Wayland/Xorg. Now, it’s the turn of Nokia and Microsoft. When I heard the news that Nokia was switching from the Symbian OS to Windows 7 for their smartphones my first reaction was: “another Microsoft patents land grab” but this article is not about the proverbial beast of Redmond but about why Nokia chose it over Android and more importantly, given the increasing convergence of laptops, smartphones and tablets, answering the question: just how free is Android and what is the relationship with GNU/Linux?—and I suspect that I’ll be needing my asbestos delicates.

Sometimes the best book on a subject is the shortest. This is a very concise book, focused very much on a single narrow, but important, subject with Blender: which is how to light your subject, create colors and textures, and generate the final 2D render from the 3D scene.

Read the review at Free Software Magazine.

Some of us want to be able to release high-definition video (possibly even 3D) without evil copy protection schemes. I’ve been avoiding Blu-Ray as a consumer since it came out, mostly because Richard Stallman said it has an evil and oppressive DRM scheme. After my first serious investigation, I can confirm his opinion, and frankly, it’s a pretty bleak situation. What can we do about it? Here’s five ideas for how we might release high definition video.

Read the article at Free software Magazine.

The Open Desktop communities Open-PC project is now offering three different models of open computers with turn-key GNU/Linux and KDE installations based on OpenSUSE (or Ubuntu). These systems could provide real competition with pre-installed Windows or Mac computers, overcoming some of the most frequently-cited problems with GNU/Linux on the desktop. The systems are now available from vendors in Europe and the USA.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

I’m donning my flame-proof suit for this post. Vim is arguably one of the two most popular text-editors used in the free software world: built on vi (its name stands for VIiMproved) it will be found as a default package in many GNU/Linux distributions. The other popular editor is EMACS (although I am sure there are those who will argue that EMACS is much more than a mere text-editor). I use Vim a lot in my work and have found it to be a little like chess: a moment to learn a lifetime to master. With that in mind here are some of the tips and handy commands I have picked up over the years.

Read the tutorial at Free Software Magazine.

Well, Christmas 2010 is over, and all the little tech toy devices have been connected, installed, and played with (or returned to the store from whence they came if they didn’t clear those hurdles). This year was an amazing success. Three major computer-linked devices worked on the first try without a hiccup. And I have to at least say a word or two about Mattel’s new Computer Engineer Barbie — a purchase I must admit was a little silly, but my daughter does play with it.

Never let it be said that the Debian project does not listen. For some time there has been growing dissent about the presence of non-free binary blobs in the Debian GNU/Linux kernel. Identi.ca and other public arenas became almost hunting grounds for some of the more fanatical freedom advocates within the community. Recommendations for using gNewSense and other 100% free distributions became more prevalent as the concerns over the non-free Debian kernels grew. The Debian project has now announced that from the release of Squeeze (Debian 6.0) their GNU/Linux kernels will be available without the non-free blobs.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

There’s a reason they’re called “movies.” They’re supposed to move. Your eyes are keyed to follow motion, and the constant revelation of new information in a moving shot holds your interest longer. Thus, while four seconds might be about the maximum comfortable length for a static shot, shots in which the camera or subject are moving extensively can often last more than a minute without feeling slow at all. Storyboards made entirely from static images make it hard to judge active shots. It’s useful, therefore, to be able to insert some movement at the storyboard phase by panning and zooming a drawing. Here I’m going to demonstrate such an animated storyboard using Inkscape and Blender.

Read the article at Free Software Magazine.

It may or may not be true that Twitter has been censoring Wikileaks as a trend but a quick pro-active search reveals that it’s a red hot topic. In the one or two minutes I browsed the search results nearly seven hundred more appeared. The arrest of Julian Assange has prompted a firestorm of abuse and sarcasm. And deep anger. Read the article at Free Software Magazine.